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Themes: Right to free elections Romania

Grosaru v. Romania  | 2010

Clearer rules for selecting national minority MPs

From my point of view, [the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights] is 100% moral reparation...

Mircea Grosaru, quoted by NewsBucovina (Photo: Camera Deputatilor)

Background

Romania’s election authorities overlooked a representative of the Italian minority for a parliamentary seat even though nationwide he was the community’s favourite.

Over 5,000 people across the country voted for Mircea Grosaru in the elections in 2000, making up over a quarter of all ballots cast for the Italian Community of Romania, the party he represented.

Mircea’s party won the most support from Italian minority voters at the polls, giving it the right to represent the community in Romania’s parliament.

However, the country’s central electoral office decided to give the parliamentary seat specially set aside for the Italian minority to one of Mircea’s party colleagues who had won almost 3,000 votes in a single constituency.

Mircea complained about the decision, first to the electoral authorities, then before the Romanian courts and finally in front of a parliamentary validation commission. But his complaints ultimately went nowhere.

Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights

The European court ruled in favour of Mircea, finding a violation of his electoral rights.

Romanian law was unclear about how to allocate a parliamentary seat set aside for the winning organisation representing a national minority, the court found. Crucially, the law did not specify whether a candidate should be selected based on whether they won the most votes at national or constituency level.

In the court’s view, there was no firm guarantee of fair treatment from some of the bodies Mircea complained to, namely the central electoral office and the parliamentary validation commission. These bodies were made up of members of other political parties who may have had interests counter to Mircea’s own.

The court also found a separate violation of the ECHR in that Mircea had had no real means of getting justice in his own country because the Romanian courts had refused to review his case and the electoral rules in question.

Follow-up

Romania repealed the law that the European court criticised for lack of clarity and brought in a new one in 2015, setting out clear rules on how parliamentary seats should be allocated to organisations representing national minorities.

Election authorities should now give the seat to the organisation which wins the most votes at the national level.

These changes, as well as other legal developments in Romania, also made it clear that central election office decisions can be challenged before the courts.

Mircea Grosaru was elected as an MP in 2004 and again in 2008.

He died in 2014.

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